US foreign policy strategies in Latin America
By Ruth Blakely
Since World War II, US foreign policy in the global South, and particularly Latin America, has been shaped by the will to ensure that the US maintains its dominant position and that it protects and promotes the interests of US capitalist elites. In this sense US foreign policy has been characterised by continuities, despite claims at the end of the Cold War that the US was entering a new era in its foreign relations. Despite these continuities in US foreign policy, the strategies for achieving these objectives have shifted. At times the dominant strategy has been coercive, and at others it has involved securing popular endorsement for efforts to establish a particular model of democracy in the South that lends itself to US interests. I outline here the shifting strategies of US foreign policy in Latin America since World War II.
COLD WAR STRATEGIES: COERCION AND REPRESSION
During the Cold War, US foreign policy strategy in Latin America was characterised predominantly by repression, by which I mean systematic violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, not simply directly, but also through proxy agents. The US engaged in or supported repression in various forms in nearly every Latin American state during the Cold War. This included directly invading some states, sponsoring coups in others and advocating repression, including torture, through the military and intelligence training it offered foreign military personnel as part of its counterinsurgency (CI) campaigns. It also involved the establishment of Operation Condor, a network for collaboration between the military and intelligence personnel of various Latin America states, led by the US. Its activities involved gathering and sharing intelligence on supposed insurgents and cooperating to detain, interrogate, torture and assassinate them.
An overview of US training of Latin American military forces gives us valuable insight into US foreign policy strategy more broadly during the Cold War. Between 1950 and 1993 the US trained over 100,000 Latin American military and police personnel in CI techniques. Training that took place at the US Army School of Americas (SOA) advocated repression, including torture. Revelations of now declassified training manuals advocating torture led to its closure in 2000, following massive public protest by School of Americas Watch (SOAW). It was immediately re-opened as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).
Investigations by the US Assistant to the Secretary of Defence for Intelligence Oversight, following the exposure of these training manuals, identified two dozen passages that were “or could be interpreted not to be consistent with US policy.” I identified a further seventeen passages in the Handling Sources manual alone that would violate the Geneva Conventions. They included material advocating interrogation, torture and assassination; the infiltration of all types of legitimate social organisation, including youth groups, trade unions and political parties; using fear tactics to recruit counterintelligence agents; the murder of informants no longer useful to the military and intelligence agencies; and intimidating families of insurgent suspects. Despite the conclusions of the investigation, these passages were entirely consistent with US Cold War foreign policy strategy, not just in Latin American but across the South. The reality is that the SOA manuals mirrored US training of its own and military and intelligence personnel during the Cold War, and the forces it trained from 102 countries throughout the period, as revealed by other military and CIA manuals.
The consequences of US-led repression in Latin America were devastating. In Guatemala, Amnesty International estimated that between 1966 and 1976, the number of victims of secretly sanctioned murders and disappearances was over 20,000. The Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala concluded that US military assistance had a “significant bearing on human rights violations.” In Chile, the Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation found that during and in the years following the US-backed 1973 coup, 2,279 people were killed. Of those, 815 were victims of execution and death by torture, 957 disappeared following arrest and the remainder were killed either as a result of war tribunals, during political protests, alleged escape attempts or gun battles. Throughout, General Pinochet’s government continued to receive US support and military training. Such human rights abuses occurred across Latin America with impunity, while the US provided ongoing support and military assistance in order to protect US strategic and elite interests.
POST-COLD WAR STRATEGIES: MARKET DEMOCRACY AND NEOLIBERALISM
US foreign policy strategy underwent a significant shift that coincided with the thawing of the Cold War. The emphasis was now on establishing “democracy,” not by coercion, but by political legitimation. The democracy being promoted by the US, variously referred to by critics as “low intensity democracy,” “polyarchy” and “market democracy,” does not constitute a form of democracy which invites opting for alternatives that stray far from the systems and practices advocated by the capitalist elite. Rather, it offers only limited choices and is carefully managed to guarantee that elite interests are protected. The outcome is the presence of democratic processes, but with large sections of the population still not having basic needs met. The emphasis on democracy promotion through political legitimation was to characterise US strategy across the global South up until 9/11.
The US has gone to great lengths through organs such as the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID to establish democracy in Latin America. The consequences have been mixed. For example, the neoliberalisation of El Salvador since the end of the civil war, which included structural adjustment policies and the privatisation of public services, has been hugely beneficial for US capital, with more than 300 US companies establishing either a permanent presence or working through representatives in the country. This has largely been achieved through ensuring that support is maintained for the ARENA party, and that movements on the Left that might threaten US capital are coopted or marginalised. US support for civic and political groups was channelled towards groups aligned with the ruling ARENA party, thus marginalizing the Left-wing FMLN. Rather than creating an independent agency to oversee postwar reconstruction, a government agency was established to administer the funding agreed with the World Bank. This agency channelled the majority of the funds, which came from USAID, through the Municipales en Acción programme, which had been established under the Comisión Nacional para la Restauración de Areas Afectadas, the agency in charge of the civilian components of the CI efforts during the war. Thus, institutions that had previously been involved in suppressing support for the insurgent left were now responsible for overseeing reconstruction among the very communities they had previously fought against. Less than one percent of the funds were channelled through opposition NGOs, even though they had proven experience in local development projects in the former conflict zones.
The effects for El Salvador’s poor have been mixed. While growth has occurred since the end of the 1980s, and a number of social indicators have improved, problems persist. Poverty is still extremely high compared to other Latin American states. In 1991, the extreme poverty rate was 33 percent. While this has fallen, the United Nations Development Programme reports that on the international extreme poverty line, whereas the incidence of extreme poverty for Argentina and Uruguay was just 0.2 percent, El Salvador was at the top end of the scale with an extreme poverty rate of 18 percent in 2002. Some of the growth in GDP is the result of extraordinary levels of remittances from Salvadoran workers living overseas, which account for more than 10 percent of annual GDP, according to the World Bank. Many Salvadoran children grow up with little contact with their fathers, who can eke out a better salary working outside the country, usually in the US, than they can in El Salvador. There are large health and education gaps, and limited infrastructure in the poorest areas, which tend to be rural.
POST 9/11 STRATEGIES: REGIME CHANGE
Since 9/11, US foreign policy strategy has continued to emphasise democracy promotion in Latin America, and these efforts have intensified. Indeed, this strategy is especially favoured by US neoconservatives. They are entirely committed to the US using unilateral force, including regime change, to this end, where political legitimation fails, and see no contradiction between this and their ultimate goal of establishing democracy. There has therefore been a resurgence of support for repression in Latin America and across the global South. Beyond Latin America, this has been through the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; attempts to re-define torture; the detention of terror suspects in facilities such as Guantánamo Bay, where alleged abuses have occurred; and the policy of extraordinary rendition, involving transferring suspects to third party countries where torture of detainees is commonplace.
In Latin America, the use of repression by the US has not been abandoned, despite the intensification of democracy promotion. Secretive military training for Latin American forces is ongoing, and the US has supported coups to overthrow governments considered a threat to US interests. Increasing militarization of the region is occurring under US leadership. The majority of US training of Latin American military personnel remains secretive and devoid of any human rights content, and has intensified since 9/11, with training now being offered to states that were previously banned by Congress from receiving certain training because of their poor human rights records. The exception is the training at WHINSEC, which I observed over a two-month period in 2004. It is now transparent, is subject to external oversight and contains significant human rights content. This accounts for just one percent of all foreign military training, however, and even at WHINSEC, there are worrying signs that some of the positive changes are being reversed, including the replacement of a very critical external oversight board by more right-wing figures following White House intervention in 2005.
The US also continues to see military intervention and support for coups as a viable option in Latin America where its interests are threatened. Following elections in Haiti in 2000, when left-wing Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned to office, US Special Forces trained 600 para- militaries, a number of whom were known abusers of human rights and were willing to overthrow Aristide. Some of them launched a coup in 2004, and enjoyed tacit support from the US, which then allegedly assisted in Aristide’s exile, at gunpoint. The US insists that Aristide voluntarily went into exile, and that he handed over a letter of resignation and left willingly. Amnesty International reported that there were some 300 cases of killings in Port-au- Prince alone following the coup, at the hands of the armed gangs associated with the coup. The truth of the Bush administration’s role may not be known for some time. However, the evidence indicates that the US was involved in funding opposition to Aristide, had trained known abusers of human rights as paramilitaries, even though their wish to overthrow a democratically elected government was common knowledge, and they were very slow to act to prevent the coup. In this sense, the US resorted to precisely the tactics it had used throughout the Cold War.
US MEDDLING IN VENEZUELA
Venezuela has also experienced US interference in its democratic process, including being implicated in a coup in 2002 to overthrow democratically-elected leader, Hugo Chávez. While it is not possible to prove at this stage whether the US engineered it, there was overt approval within the Bush administration, as indicated by the comments of George Folson, president of the International Republican Institute, on the day after the coup: “Last night, led by every sector of civil society, the Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country. Venezuelans were provoked into action as a result of systematic repression by the Government of Hugo Chávez.” This reflected the Bush administration’s position – that Chávez is undemocratic. At least 100 people were killed in the events surrounding the coup. Other revelations have surfaced not just of senior officials being involved, but of the CIA and senior officials also having prior knowledge of the coup and not warning Chávez in advance, an indication of US support for the coup.
More recently, social reform programmes such as the redistribution of land and the re-nationalisation of oil and gas reserves launched by Chávez and by Evo Morales in Bolivia have been met by significant hostility from the US. This has included condemnations of both governments with the US arguing that they threaten democracy. Meanwhile, US military activity in Latin America has intensified, with increased training of military personnel from states bordering Venezuela and Bolivia, and proposals for a US military base in Paraguay close to the Bolivian border. The US argues that the training and proposed base are necessary for US counter-drug and counterterror operations. The reality is that such militarisation constitutes an attempt by the US to reassert its influence and dominance in the region and to thwart alternatives to neoliberalism.
The main objectives of US foreign policy since World War II have been to ensure US global dominance and to open up the global South to US capitalist elites. Nowhere have efforts of this kind been more intense and more sustained than in Latin America. The US has used two key strategies to subjugate Latin America to its objectives. Firstly, the US has used armed coercion, either directly or through proxy forces that it has trained to carry out its CI campaigns. This has been at great cost to human rights. Secondly, the US has sought to establish democracy and neoliberalism in Latin America, as recently this has been considered the most effective means of ensuring the spread of global capitalism, ultimately benefiting US elites. The benefits for the populations of Latin America are extremely limited. The democratic systems that have been established offer only choices that do not conflict with the interests of the US state and US capitalist elites. Real alternatives are co-opted, marginalised or, increasingly since 9/11, deemed undemocratic and met with coercion. Similarly, the neoliberalisation of Latin America has not improved the harsh conditions faced by many of Latin America’s poor.
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Ruth Blakeley is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol, UK.
